[qwertfisch]

As with many languages that compile to a VM, I always ask myself: that’s all nice, but how do I interact with anything OUTSIDE of my program?

Can I do networking? Can I do system calls to my OS? Display graphics and sound? Can I import a C library that will do all that and call its functions? And if so, how? I just can’t see it from any documentation. Yes, I can call functions from other BEAM-based languages, but then I’m going in circles.

[__jonas]

If you mean specifically on the BEAM (ignoring JS runtimes), the two options are ports and NIFs, both of which unfortunately have their drawbacks.

The Erlang docs on this are here: https://www.erlang.org/doc/system/overview.html

[qwertfisch]

Thank you for the docs and explanation.